At EHLO, we love customer success stories about Exchange! How Exchange, Outlook and Office make users' lives better, improve productivity, and make work fun is what excites us. Today's post is the first in a series of customer testimonials we bring you to highlight what we're hearing about Exchange 2010 from our customers. In this post, Jonathan Pisarczyk shares his thoughts about why Phaeton Automotive chose Exchange 2010 and how that decision has changed his company.

Phaeton Automotive Group operates seven successful dealerships in southern Ontario, Canada. Having excellent customer service and being able to leverage technology were key differentiators for us.

Since we have multiple locations, our employees relied heavily on email for communication. We typically used our cell phones to check voice and email messages and we knew we needed a more streamlined approach for messaging that integrated both of these functions regardless of location.

We'd been using Google Apps to manage employee messaging and collaboration needs but wanted better security and privacy. Google Apps was inadequate in meeting business needs. It didn't allow single sign-on service, user migration and couldn't help us centrally manage multiple domains.

Ultimately we determined that an in-house messaging platform would be best suited to our needs and switched to Exchange 2010. It helped us reduce communication costs while allowing staff to be more productive. It also provided greater flexibility in the way we managed our messaging environment. For example, with just a few clicks, Outlook automatically sets up a new user in a matter of minutes. This type of automation has saved our IT department a significant amount of time.

In addition to greater efficiencies we also gained significant cost savings. When we replaced Google Apps with Exchange 2010, we saved the company $18,000. Employees can now receive their voice messages in their inboxes, and manage those voice messages just as they do e-mail with Outlook and Outlook Web Access.

The ability to have employees securely access all their communications - e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging - from their PC, phone or browser is a big advantage. Now, voice mail is delivered into users' mailboxes just like email, which enables staff to use Outlook Web Access on their laptops or Outlook Voice Access through their phone to listen to voice mail when they're not in the office.

Having Exchange 2010 has enabled our IT department to support more mission critical business functions with the certainty that our employees have the tools they need to be more successful.

Google Apps has user migration (and unlike MS, they make it easy to migrate your data OFF Google Apps:

IMAP Based:

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=61369

Exchange Based:

https://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=172212

Moving off Google Apps:

http://www.dataliberation.org/

centrally managed domains is the only issue mentioned that's really an issue. Multidomain support is present but not as flexible as Exchange is. This is more an inconvience though as the IT Department can just manage the domains seperately if need be.

Nice to see companies doing this - lots of people see Google Apps as a real alternative to an Exchange setup, and often consider it as an option.
Exchange 2010 is actually a pretty easy sales pitch against competitors - there are plenty of real world benefits to focus on.
Of course, there are people who are very good at selling alternatives, but feature for feature, for the task it's designed to do, Exchange is unbeatable in my opinion.

I think the "hosted" aspect is a large benefit people see, and often leads to people looking at Google Apps. There are some benefits which are lost when hosting Exchange on a shared platform, but are available when you look at dedicated hosting. Our company deals with only dedicated Exchange hosting, where a company has their own infrastructure, on their own servers. This means you get every great feature Exchange offers, whilst enjoying the "outsourced, hosted" model.

This is really becoming fun, Personally being at IT consultant on infrastructure products, all I can say is if anyone has used Google apps side by side with Exchange / Office suites and still maintains that google is better does not know what he is talking about.
Love the new features with 2010, well done on the new product. Just one more on my wishlist for MS, Bring out the same level / better integration on Windows mobile 7 (8 maybe?) That would be the knockout IMO..

OCS is not required to implement the voice mail feature. It is handled by the Unified Messaging server which is one of Exchange server roles.
However OCS would provide additional voice features such as integration with VoIP and PSTN telephony, audio conferencing, and web conferencing.

Cool. We realized long ago that a well managed IT department in a large enough company (generally anything above 50 people) beats SaaS any day. SaaS is great for small numbers of users, but paying 100% of your license cost every single year is ludicrous. In addition, the loss of functionality and security puts you at a disadvantage from day 1. We firmly believe that the "managed" model is also inefficient (when we were smaller we switched Exchange from managed to inhouse and saved $30K/year instantly).

The problem is that these service providers (SaaS or Managed) tell customers that they'll need X number of employees to run a particular system themselves. What is not considered is the fact that one employee can manage a multitude of systems (we have 3 people managing 600 Linux based systems).

To realize more savings (over $120K), reduce complexity, increase features/performance, and improve reliability we have moved our worldwide users over to an inhouse instance of Zimbra. We have all that was cited (voicemail, IM, email) on a completely mixed client platform (35% Mac, 60% Windows, 5% Linux), with Blackberry Enterprise and ActiveSync support.

I dont have anything against Google and I love Gmail, but when it comes to Enterprise messaging, my answer is Exchange.
The flexibility exchange gives, I bet no product offers. I know companies who moved from Exchange to Google apps for monetary benefit and are nowhere now.